> There are also, concerningly IMO, an extremely large amount of people willing to accept severe surveillance or privacy downsides so long as it helps achieve the goal about kids.

I’m alive. Nice to meet you.

I “accept severe surveillance”, not in the sense that I agree with it, but because I know that it already exists and has existed and that people that are against it are screaming into the wind. Many large and small countries have long histories of surveillance.

It’s not that you shouldn’t try to enforce privacy, in fact, the law requires it if you in some cases, and it’s a good idea in others.

I’m certainly not against the EFF standing up for the rights of everyone not to be severely surveilled.

But, realistically, the public cannot easily anonymize our activity and data. And if you try to do so, you’re painting yourself as a target.

If you were trying to keep your country safe, wouldn’t you like the ability to infiltrate any major cloud, SaaS app, social media platform, bank, government, VPN/internal network, and OS?

Similarly, if you were a big data or security company wouldn’t you also do everything you could to know everything it is to know about a person if you had the means and time and it made sense for your business?

Following, if you were to have that power as a government, business, or other organization, wouldn’t it be critical to ensure that you restricted its use to ensure it wasn’t abused to the point that you’d lose it, even though the reality would be that you probably don’t have time to keep it as safe as you need to?

I “accept severe surveillance” not because I promote it or want it, but because I understand how the world works and what it does.

All these things will pass. If you have the focus and the mental capacity to do what is good, then do it. It likely helped the world in some way to learn about KGB wiretaps. But, in the U.S., as far as I can tell, the backlash against the CIA and NSA was just used for political gain and then to replace those that didn’t agree with the current administration. Was that helpful? And who are we really being manipulated by when we attack ourselves and install destabilizing leaders?

I suppose it depends on how much else you want to see. E.g. the recent discussion on Australia's social media band for teens https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208348 has ~1500 comments covering nearly every possible angle I could have conceived and some positions I'm not sure I would have even been able to imagine. Focusing on about the kids is a popular position in threads like that, and one of the top 5 top level comments is even an example of "I care about the kids and don't want to discuss how it should be about these other things".

We're all in bubbles. But it's good to expand them when you recognize you're in one.

Write to your legislators/representatives.

Honestly, it is the only thing that you can do, apart from voting and talking to people in your near environment.

Is it a good solution, and always likely to work? No, absolutely not.

But is a hell of a lot better than doing nothing or sharing social media posts, which is frankly as effective as screaming into your pillow at home.

How about the majority of the recent thread about the Australian social media ban?

BTW the Australian law says it's illegal for a platform to require government ID for age verification.

Hear, hear! I'll add another:

"Age Verification is about suppressing the 'undesirable' for kids, but also for you". I.e. having to share your personal identity for that taboo (but legal and harmless) sex site (or whatever someone in power might not approve of) sure is going to make you think twice and may even kill many smaller instances withojt making them illegal outright.

It may not sound bad in a single example, but eventually there is something you like that is fine but gets added to the list.

The real problem with these people is they always just end up supporting pedophiles, so all their zealous justice is really moot.

The first comment is a real example of what I was saying about seeing the reverse situation - when it's someone you disagree with it becomes obvious how dangerous it is to say other views/ideas are not supposed to be part of the conversation. zthe other comments are ones I'f personally disagree with, but that's precisely the kind if discourse which needs to be engaged with instead of ignored if one has any concerns around fascism taking hold.

Also, I don't want to give the impression the only path here is to placate the other concerns/interest. That does work very well if you can, but the main point is just avoid this idea declaring anny other ideas out of the conversation because you disagree with them and only want people to talk about what you like. That doesn't help, you want to convince people to see the reasons you do not to ignore them.

If you ever feel there are threads with shills, take the time to send an email to hn@ycombinator.com with the parts in question. This isn't just some platitude people say here, they've really hopped right on it, triggered action, and got back to me every time I've emailed.

Parenting is, and always has been, a collective responsibility. We made it illegal to sell alcohol to kids, instead of just complaining that parents weren't teaching them not to drink it.

This take is really detached from reality, I get down voted for this whenever I ask, but do you have kids? If not sorry, but your opinion means nothing.

We all exist in a society and (as the other comment says) it take society to raise kids. I don't want a society where as a parent I have to fight against shitty parents and the potential immaturity of my kids (they are too young right now thank god) to stop them watching porn as a 11yo or other inappropriate gifts from internet "culture".

Setting some reasonable standards for what content kids should consume provides parents with cover when trying to raise their children well. Its the reason movies have age gates, and strip clubs and many other things not on the internet.

Does the “sell” part matter - like is it simply that the sale to minors can be regulated? If it is free isn’t it just transmission of information?

Like many mention in other comments on this post, it's possible to implement using ZKPs. There are likely other methods that would be effective without compromising privacy. None of them are part of the Age Verification discussion because kids are not the actual point of Age Verification.

When I say "if we have to know you're not a kid, we have to know who you are" I'm not stating an actual truth, but the argument as it is playing out politically.

> Are you aware of any age verification systems that do not have this property?

As I understand it, it's the goal of OpenID4VP[1][2]. Using it a site can request to know if the user is over 18 say, and the user can return proof of just that one claim, I'm over 18, without sharing identifying information.

The new EU age verification solution[3] builds on this for example.

[1]: https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-presentations-1...

[2]: https://docs.walt.id/concepts/data-exchange-protocols/openid...

[3]: https://ageverification.dev/

1) Large social media companies know you better than your friends. That has been known for 10 years and they're way better now: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/facebook-knows-yo...

2) Cigarette vending machines accept VISA cards and government IDs and they're offline.

3) A medium-sized social media network required photos (not scans) of GovIDs, where only year of birth and validity date need to visible. The rest could be blacked out physically.

4) You can guess users' age and only request solid proof only for those you are unsure about.

The problem is that we technical users think of a one-size-fits-all technical approach that works, without a single fail, for all global users. That is bound to fail.

It is only a law and you can break it big time or small time. Reddit's approach might proof way too weak, it'll be fined and given a year to improve. Others might leave the market. Others will be too strict and struggle to get users. Others might have weak enforcement and keep a low profile forever. Others will start small, below the radar and explode in popularity and then enforcement will have to improve.

You can also request identity and then delete it. (Yes, some will fail to delete and get hacked.)

Giving Facebook a free pass is stupid. They're selling your age cohort "10-11" within 0.0037ms for 0.$0003 to the highest bidder on their ad platform.

How about:

https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/opening-up-ze...

I have one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223051

GNU Taler has an age-verification extension.

Cool trick to tie in the libertarian idea of protecting yourself from legally sanctioned government actions.

> They don't take your ID, your picture and store it forever and then sell information about you to other people.

It would not surprise me in the least if there are brick-and-mortar businesses doing this, especially larger companies in jurisdictions (such as the majority of the United States) with weak/nonexistent privacy protections.

> These are not equivalent, I don't have to scan my face, upload my ID and share my personal biometric data with various 3rd parties, who will sell and leak my data, every time I want to look at porn or sip a beer

Oh man, you must just not go out much anymore. I’ve seen a lot of bars with full blown facial scanners next to their bouncer.

> I can absolutely guarantee you that any teenager can easily get access to weed, cigarettes and alcohol

Is you argument then that we shouldn't age gate those things in reality either? Would you suggest that teenagers smoke and drink just as much as they would have had it been legal to sell to minors?

Laws don't just exist to stop you, they also exist to shape society. They exist as signals for what we deem appropriate behavior.

Not sure if you've bought alcohol lately, but at most large grocers near me, they're scanning licenses now instead of just verifying the birth date - and I'm pretty confident those scans aren't just checking the birthdate and then deleting all record of the interaction..

So then this is an easy problem. Issue liquor stores a terminal. Liquor guy checks licenses. If you're an adult, the clerk presses a button. A public key is generated and uploaded to a public list. You get a private key that shows you're an adult and is not tied to you. Regular laws that apply to liquor also apply to this private key QR code... You cannot give it to a minor or sell it without a license.

To view adult content, use the code to sign a thing. Content company sees the signed code, verifies against the public list and sends the content.

Privacy preserved, no adult content to kids... Easy.

A lot of the proposals don't involve you sending your drivers license or "other information" to anyone. The site in question asks you to verify with a trusted third party (usually a government entity), and that trusted third party only provides then with the end result of the validation.

> which is what Google etc have been trying to do for years but this would just completely fast track that.

Excuse me? They have done that for years. There's nothing to "fast track" here. Big Tech already implemented surveillance.

> The issue I'm trying to sound the horn on is that the current push for AF in the US and EU has nothing to do with kids. I think you could put together a working group on ZKPs and Age Verification, write up a paper and run experiments, and when you bring it to the lawmakers they're gonna say something to the tune of:

The EU is currently doing large-scale field tries of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, which they have been working on for several years. It uses ZKPs for age verification. They expect to roll it out to the public near the end of 2026.

How does age verification work for online vape shops?

I don't, but society clearly does. We're already there.

If HN is social media, then so are PHPBB, NNTP, BBS, etc. and the term loses its semantic relevance.

My heuristic is that social media focuses on particular people, regardless of what they're talking about. In contrast, forums (like HN) focus on a particular topic, regardless of who's talking about it.

> Over 70% of teenagers <18 today have watched porn [1]. We all know (many from experience) that kids easily get around whatever restrictions adults put on their computers. We all know the memes about "click here if you're 18" being far less effective than "click here if you're not a robot."

And we all turned out fine I might add. In fact there's a lot more attention to consent and respect for women than 20 years ago.

Of course not counting the toxic masculine far right but that doesn't have anything to do with porn but everything with hate.

Is porn the biggest problem here? What I've seen points the finger at social media as the worst offender for youth mental health.

Also, access to porn isn't new with the internet. When we cleared out my grandpa's house we had to pry open a desk that was chock full of hustlers.

> Parental control software has existed for decades. It hasn't worked.

How would you know whether it has worked or not? Wouldn't the relevant criteria be up to parents themselves?

It's also already illegal to send porn to a minor. Porn companies that transmit porn to minors are already committing a sex crime.

> has existed

Sorry, but if you would actually read my post, you would notice that I am not proposing that it should merely "exist", but that it should come enabled by default on all new devices.

There is no "good parenting" fix that will keep children from trying to access inappropriate content, forums where unhealthy conversation takes place, pornography, and worse. Being a good parent does not and cannot remove the curiosity, temptation, and ability to access bad content. This is a problem with the human condition, not bad parenting.

As a parent myself (and, I hope, a good one), I have found it very difficult to effectively monitor and limit my children's ability to access these things. And I have more facility with technology than the average parent. It's a complex and frustrating problem and the stakes are high.

Yes all those things are great, but you'll notice that instead of explaining this to the non-technical crowd, technology focused privacy concerned individuals rarely attempt to educate about how these could work. Instead they simply seem to be against any sort of control on what children watch online.

Given that it's also coming from a bunch of tech males, it comes across as extraordinarily creepy. This is not hard to understand.